STC Publication Statistics: Some Caveats

The statistics for publication in the period 1475-1640 published by Maureen Bell and John Barnard in 1992, and reprinted in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain a decade later, were compiled not from the entries in the revised Short-Title Catalogue but from the chronological index to those entries. They substantially exaggerate the number of actual editions recorded by STC. A similar reliance on that index instead of the entries themselves led John N. King, in some statistics published in 1999, to inflate the eleven mid-Tudor editions of the Bible in English into more than a hundred alleged editions in more than one language.